Donut Days Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgements

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.). Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England. Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.). Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd). Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India. Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd). Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2009 by Lara Zielin.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Published simultaneously in Canada.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zielin, Lara, 1975- Donut days / by Lara Zielin. p. cm. Summary: During a campout promoting the opening of a donut shop in a small Minnesota town, sixteen-year-old Emma, an aspiring journalist, begins to connect an ongoing pollution investigation with the turmoil in the evangelical Christian church where her parents are pastors. [1. Faith—Fiction. 2. Clergy—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Self-Actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Journalism—Fiction. 6. Sex role—Fiction. 7. Evangelicalism—Fiction. 8. Christian life—Fiction. 9. Minnesota—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.Z497Don 2009 [Fic]—dc22 2008026138

  eISBN : 978-1-101-03286-2

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Rob

  He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus,

  but he talks like a gentleman.—The Killers

  We could not talk or talk forever and

  still find things to not talk about.—Best in Show

  After the flood, all the colors came out.—U2

  Chapter One

  I’m no biblical scholar, but I’m pretty sure Adam—as in the guy who named all the animals in the Garden of Eden—wasn’t a hermaphrodite.

  Turns out my mom had a different opinion.

  If I’d known my mom was going to give Adam a sex change in front of the entire Living Word Redeemer congregation, I would have stayed away from her Friday night service. I would have just bummed a ride off someone, or ridden my bike, or taken a bus—all the things you do for transportation when you’re sixteen, like me, and you don’t have a car—and headed over to the Crispy Dream donut camp.

  Instead, I sat in the front pew in the sanctuary (my gut tightening by the second), listening to my mom, Pastor Sarah Goiner, talk about the Garden of Eden. Normally this wouldn’t be a touchy subject, but with everything going on in the church these days, it would be better if my mom had talked about abortion, or gay rights, or prayer in school, or even a combination of all three.

  Next to me, my dad, Pastor Mitchell Goiner, was sitting ramrod straight in the pew. On Sundays he did the preaching, but Fridays it was all about my mom. The panicked way his neck cords were sticking out told me he probably wished he could take my mom’s place at the pulpit—either that or put duct tape over her mouth.

  Up on stage, my mom flipped through her Bible, which was so battered and worn that a couple pages floated to the floor like a tree shedding its leaves in the fall. My Bible, on the other hand, had a spine so perfect that it still cracked when you opened its gleaming pages. Every time I went to follow along during a sermon, the noise would practically ricochet through the sanctuary. I’d feel the pupils of the congregation boring into the back of my head, all of them silently scolding me for being the pastor’s kid who didn’t read the Word enough.

  “God took Eve from Adam,” my mom said, walking across the stage, “from his rib.” The lights above my mom had gels on them to soften their glare, and tonight they looked like they were coating her with blueberry preserves. This, plus the lavender carpet, made her skin seem beaten and bruised.

  “And then Adam calls Eve one of his own kind,” my mom continued. “You know what that means? It means her female form wasn’t new to him—rather, she was familiar.”

  With my peripheral vision I noticed a couple people shift in their seats. Stop now, Mom, I pleaded silently. Please, stop now.

  “Familiar,” my mom continued, her words quickening, “because men and women both bear God’s image. Both of them.” There was a half second of silence in the congregation. “Both of them!” my mom repeated, raising her voice a little.

  Usually after my mom makes an emphatic statement like that, someone in the church agrees with it—out loud. But this time, no amens erupted from the sanctuary. No one’s hands were waving in encouragement, no heads were bent with furious note-taking. My dad now had a vein throbbing in his forehead and a tiny bead of sweat dribbling down one temple.

  And then my mom raised her hands toward the ceiling and tilted her head back and said, “My people, listen to me! Adam had the programming for being female in him all along. And since Adam was made in the image of God, that means God is both male and female. Adam was both male and female! Do you understand what this means? Men and women are equal. They are one and the same!”

  She may as well have walloped half the congregation in the face with the Old Testament. I mean, take it from someone who’s gone to church twice a week since she was in the womb: the idea that Adam was both male and female—at least before God took out his rib and separated the female part—wasn’t something you heard a lot. And even though Birch Lake High, home of the Fighting Saplings, might not be filled with the smartest kids ever, I didn’t get to be number three in my class and associate editor of our school’s paper, the Chieftain, by missing out on the obvious—which is to say that if you’re a pastor and your church is in turmoil, the way to make your point about everything that’s going on is not to say that the originator of humankind had both a penis and a vagina.

  “Blasphemy!” someone cried from the back of the church. I turned, but I couldn’t see who it was—they were just a dark shape as they exited the sanctuary. I cringed as a handful of the c
ongregation followed, stomping down the aisle in protest.

  “In Jesus’ name, let her finish!” someone else cried.

  My dad turned to me with a look of horror. On the stage, my mom was frozen in place, her mouth open in a little O. My dad stood and, not knowing what else to do, I stood too.

  Following our lead, the remaining congregants were on their feet in seconds. Some of them swarmed us like religious paparazzi.

  “What is going on?”

  “Pastor Goiner, you can’t condone this.”

  “This was exactly the right thing to do. God bless you.”

  My dad and I were starting to get penned in by people. I looked around, debating whether or not I should hurdle the pew and make a break for the back door, when I spotted Nat among the crowd. Nat was my best friend—or former best friend, I should say—and at that moment she was walking arm in arm with Molly O’Connor, whose dad was the reason for all the church’s problems to begin with. If Nat and I weren’t in the biggest fight ever, I would have called out to her and maybe we could have done what we had planned to do before our big throwdown, which was go to the Crispy Dream donut camp. Maybe we could have talked about this crazy scene while we drank coffee and chewed on crullers. No O’Connors around for miles.

  Instead, Nat clutched Molly’s arm more tightly and leaned over to whisper something in her ear. Molly immediately turned to stare at me, her eyes narrowed. Her lips were pulled into a tight frown until she opened them to mouth a word that I said too sometimes, one that rhymed with witch, but that I’d never, ever said inside the walls of church.

  I blinked. How could Molly be mad at me, after what her dad had done? Her dad with his gobs of money and his car with the license plate that read BLESSD—all from running a soap company called Mollico, named for Molly herself, of course. I was convinced that if Mr. O’Connor had been broke like the rest of us, he never would have been made head of the church board. And if that hadn’t happened, I was willing to bet none of the other prophecy drama would have taken place either.

  With my face burning, I watched Molly and Nat go. Molly’s blond extensions were piled on the back of her head like a movie star’s, like church was a red-carpet event in her world. How had it come to this? I closed my eyes, thinking how school was going to start in a matter of days, and how I’d have to begin my senior year with Nat and Molly hating my guts. Plus Nat was in love with Carson Tanner, who also hated me, which was another issue altogether.

  Fabulous.

  Next to me, I heard snippets from the conversations my dad was fielding.

  “Do not be hindered from obeying!”

  “God made man in His image!”

  “The nations will rise up in judgment!”

  What were they saying? What did all that really mean? I had no idea.

  Then again, I had no idea about a lot of things. Other people in the church, though, supposedly understood just about everything, including God’s will, from reading the Bible. But if you asked me, it wasn’t that simple. I mean, the Bible was thick for a reason. And when you had people in the church disagreeing about something that was so hard to nail down, let me tell you, I’d take a plague of locusts over that anytime. At least with the locusts you could grab a can of Raid and feel like you were getting somewhere.

  Chapter Two

  My dad broke free from the congregants long enough to grab my arm. “Emma, go get your sister out of Little Saints,” he said.

  No way, I thought. I didn’t want to walk through the church all by my lonesome after my mom had given such a controversial sermon. I looked up at the stage to see if my mom was still there, but she was gone. Probably she’d fled back to her office to pray.

  “Dad—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “Listen to me. I’ll get your mom. You get your sister. We need to reconvene as a family as soon as possible. So go. Now.” The dark look on his face told me this was a) serious and b) not a good time to argue.

  I tramped up the sanctuary aisle, trying to ignore the stares being leveled at me. I smoothed my T-shirt with the 1980s band INXS on the front and suddenly wished I’d worn something else. This was a bad time to remind the congregation that I didn’t listen to Christian music very much. In fact, some of the members of Living Word had actually complained to my dad about my choice in music-slash-fashion. As if the old band shirts that I bought at resale shops were satanic or something.

  Eventually, my dad had told me to stop wearing the shirts to church. I hadn’t out-and-out disagreed with him when he’d said that, because that would have been disciplinary suicide, but I did stomp around the house and fume for days. Finally my mom, tired of both of us, suggested a compromise, which was that I didn’t wear the shirts to church on Sunday, but Friday would be okay. It was a deal.

  Wiping thoughts about the shirts out of my mind, I tried to refocus on the reason the church was in turmoil, which had started the day Nat and I had been baptized. It was the same day Mr. O’Connor had waded into the Minnetonka River and had changed everything—and not in a good way either.

  I ran my hand along the edges of the pews as I thought back to that day. The whole church had gathered at the end of a woodsy trail, just a stone’s throw from the Minnetonka River. We always had an outdoor service for the spring baptisms, and that day we’d gotten lucky with the weather: the sun was out and all the snow was melted. Buds were starting to sprout on branches. The praise and worship band was playing under a large oak tree, their instruments and faces dappled by sun and shadow. Their music was carried to the tops of the trees on a mild breeze.

  Next to me my mom raised her hands and started dancing. “God’s been good to me, oh, God’s always been gooood to meeee,” she sang, her voice just a little off-key. She stuck one foot out, then the other.

  A few feet away, a handful of the congregants started dancing too. Chunks of new grass flew as they kicked and twirled. Some of them jerked like they’d been electrocuted, and a few even fell down. No one went to help them, though, because they weren’t hurt or anything; that’s just how the power of God is manifested at Living Word Redeemer.

  Nat, who was standing on the other side of me, elbowed me and leaned over. “Carson said he was going to try and be here,” she said in a low, excited voice.

  “Huh,” I replied, thinking how Carson was probably coming just so he could see Nat emerge from the river dripping wet.

  Nat raised her eyebrows at me like she could read my thoughts. Which probably she could, since we’d known each other for so long. We’d been best friends ever since my parents had invited her parents over for brunch after Sunday service, back when Nat and I were little and her parents were new to Living Word Redeemer. My mom said that after Nat and I had finished fighting over who could color in my brand-new Scooby-Doo coloring book, we were inseparable.

  I tried smiling at Nat, hoping it would disguise my distaste for Carson. Not that he was a bad guy—he wasn’t. It’s just that I always figured Nat would pick someone a little less . . . stupid. I mean, Nat could tell you the Greek and Latin roots of almost every word in the English language. Carson, on the other hand, seemed like he could barely spell his own name. His best attribute was that he was hot. Smoking hot, in fact, with sea-blue eyes and an Abercrombie model’s body. Nat and Carson were waiting to be together—officially—until early September, when Nat turned seventeen and her parents lifted her dating moratorium. But still. Hot or not, I thought Nat could do better.

  “Hey, there’s Molly,” I said, changing the subject. Molly was near the praise and worship band, standing with her parents—but without Jake, her older brother, who was away at the University of Minnesota. Molly ’s hands were stuffed into her pants pockets and she was frowning. I figured she was mad because my dad had baptized her two years ago, when Mr. O’Connor had made the entire O’Connor family go in for a dunk together. Normally my dad likes to wait until people are at least sixteen to baptize them, but since this was a family affair, my dad made an exception. M
olly was still pissed about it and always said she wanted to be baptized with Nat and me.

  Nat and I turned suddenly as a woman nearby started shouting, “Lo lo kama bee shaka boora lo lo.” It would have sounded like gibberish to anyone who wasn’t an evangelical church member. But I knew it was her way of speaking in tongues.

  “Today,” my mom said from the other side of me, “maybe that will be you.” I nodded. Maybe.

  Most everyone at Living Word spoke in tongues—except me. In fact, I’d never really experienced anything extra-spiritual—ever. I mean, sure, I’d felt at peace in church, and one time when I saw a homeless man walk through our front doors and the whole church took up an offering just for him, I believed God must be really close by. But I just never experienced God the way other people in the church did, with tongues and falling down and visions and whatnot.

  I knew some people expected the pastor’s daughter to be more spiritually connected, and I knew my parents worried about the fact that I read the newspaper more than my Bible. I honestly wasn’t trying to be difficult—it’s just that the Bible didn’t always seem as relevant to me as, say, the headlines of the day. Still, I didn’t want to be a disappointment to anyone, and of course I wanted to feel the power of God personally. With any luck, God would show up today while I was submerged in the water and splice in the religious gene I seemed to be missing.

  Nat grabbed my hand and squeezed as the last praise and worship song ended. I squeezed back. “Let us make our way to the water,” my dad said. The crowd spread out as we headed down a small trail toward the banks of the river. As Nat and I walked together, I thought about how most people get baptized when they’re infants—when they’re too little to really know what’s happening and they just get a few sprinkles of holy water on their head. But at Living Word, baptisms have to be a choice, which is why you can’t get baptized until you’re at least sixteen. You have to believe in the renewal and rebirth of your soul, so much so that you’re willing to submerge your whole self in the Minnetonka River in the springtime. And trust me, if you’re going to go into a body of water in April in Minnesota, you darn well better believe in something.